Say hello to new elements: Nihonium, Moscovium, Tennessine and Oganesson

A team of Japanese scientists have satisfied the standards for naming a new element i.e. element 113.

The research at the government-affiliated Riken Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science led by Kosuke Morita was informed of the decision by the US-based International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry on 31 December.

The search at Riken for element 113 had been ongoing since September 2003.

Element 113 falls between copernicium and flerovium on the periodic table.

Element 113 was created by "bombarding a thin layer of bismuth with zinc ions traveling at about 10 percent the speed of light".

Isotopes of element 113 have a very brief half-life, persisting for "less than a thousandth of a second" which made its discovery all the more difficult.

A Japanese research team has been given the liberty to christen the new element 113.

Likely names for element 113 are Japonium (after Japan, the land where the element was created), Rikenium (after the scientific institute where Morita serves), and Nishinarium (after Yoshio Nishina, a Japanese physicist who is usually termed "the founding father of modern physics research in Japan").

After element 113, Morita and his team will now aim to discover elements 119 and 120 via hot fusion experiments.

His team will now "look to the uncharted territory of element 119" and examine the chemical properties of the elements in the 7th and 8th rows.

Morita said that he and his colleagues will work towards the development of an "island of stability."

4 new elements were added to the periodic table.

This latest addition finally completes the table's 7th row, "rendering science textbooks around the world instantly out of date."

The elements, identified by scientists in Russia, Japan, and America, are the first to be added to the table since 2011 (elements 114 and 116 were added then).

The elements haven't been formerly named yet.

4 chemical elements were officially added to the periodic table.

The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry announced their names: Nihonium (Nh) Nihon means Japan, Moscovium (Mc) after Moscow, Tennessine (Ts) after Tennessey, and Oganesson (Og) after Russian researcher Yuri Oganessian.

The scientists who discovered the elements named them.

All the elements are man-made, created in labs by the researchers.